Signs for Lost Children

Sarah Moss

• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781609453800
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

In Victorian Cornwall, a doctor risks her marriage to fight for female asylum patients: "One of the most memorable heroines of recent fiction " ( The Times, London). Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize for Historical Fiction Ally Moberley, a recently qualified doctor, never expected to marry until she met architect Tom Cavendish. But only weeks into their marriage, Tom sets out for Japan, leaving Ally as she begins work at the Truro Asylum in Cornwall. Horrified by the brutal attitudes of male doctors and nurses toward their female patients, Ally plunges into the institutional politics of women's mental health at a time when madness is only just being imagined as treatable. She has to contend with a longstanding tradition of permanently institutionalizing women who are deemed difficult, all the while fighting to be taken seriously in a profession dominated by men. Meanwhile, Tom is overseeing the building of lighthouses, and has a commission from a wealthy collector to bring back embroideries and woodwork. As he travels Japan in search of these enchanting objects, he begins to question the value of the life he left in England. As Ally becomes increasingly absorbed in the moral importance of her work, and Tom pursues his interests on the other side of the world, they will return to each other as different people. From the blustery coast of Western England to the landscape of Japan, Signs for Lost Children offers a "fine exploration of marriage and the complex minds of 'lost children'—that is, all of us" ( The New York Times Book Review ). "Compelling... A quietly devastating portrait of the way identity crumbles when you've nothing, or no one, to pin it to." —The Guardian

PART ONE
LONDON, SUMMER 1878

WHERE THINGS COME FROM

Tom walks onto the platform. No, he thinks, I ascend the podium. I am The Speaker. His notes dampen in his fingers; well, it is warm in here. Silence spreads like smoke through his audience, faces turn. He takes a breath, offers a reassuring smile over the lectern, and begins.

He knows these audiences. It is where he himself began, slipping into the gallery of the Workers’ Education Society Hall in Harrogate for the evening lecture series, sitting among men whose hands told their trades. Thick fingers calloused and scarred, engrained with iron or brick dust or oil, the minerals that fuel the Empire making their way through layers of skin and into the blood of England’s working men. Aye lad, they said, sit and hear if you will, just so’s you’re quiet, start young and you’ll make something of yourself yet. It was his mother’s greatest, perhaps sole, ambition, that he should make something of himself, and here he is. The Speaker.

Later, he will give them the geometry, the trigonometry, the calculation of the reflection and refraction of light. At the beginning, it is not how but why. Because, he says, lighthouses are the beacons of progress. Lighthouses illuminate the advance of civilisations. Like any form of civil engineering, lighthouses allow those who build and maintain them to save the lives of others or to walk the world with deaths on their consciences, but that is not really what they are for, not why governments spend thousands of pounds. Sailors’ lives are important but you who work in the mills and factories, who spend your lives in this city, know that history is not made by the lives and deaths of individuals. Lighthouses are important because without them, there cannot be intercontinental trade. Because only explorers will chance a ship approaching an unknown coast after nightfall or in fog; no cargo captain in his right mind would hazard such a thing. The tea you drink, he tells his audience, the calico your wives wear, the raisins in your pudding, come to us across the seas by grace of lighthouses. Where there are no lighthouses, there are no ships, and where there are no ships, there is no trade. It follows that where there are no lighthouses there may be great resources untapped and much wealth to be made and shared. Who knows what riches lie behind unlit harbours, behind sandbars and cliffs, down inlets where darkness and fog have rested unbroken since the beginning of the world? Make no mistake, gentlemen, our knowledge of the world, our conversations with those in far places, begin with the building of lighthouses.

Ah, he has them now. They are city-dwellers, men whose lives pass in the shadows of buildings, whose lungs are silted with coalsmoke, and few will ever cross the sea. But they know their river and the great ships creeping up it on the tide; they know the sharp scent of new calico and the musky sweetness of a dried raisin or fig. They know where things come from. Now we can talk about how.

He finishes. There is applause. This, always, is the point at which he feels foolish: what is a man supposed to do with his face, with his hands, while a hundred other men face him and clap? He smiles and bows, or at least, ducks his head. A different kind of man would have practised before the mirror. He ducks again and goes down the three steps to the main body of the hall. Descends the podium.

The boy has been waiting for him outside the door, apparently oblivious to the rain beginning to fall. Tom, still warm as if he has been rowing or running, raises his face to the wet wind. A posh boy, you can tell from his clothes and something about the way he stands, about the angle of shoulders and neck, but all boys want to run away to sea.

‘Excuse me, Mr. Cavendish? Could you spare me a moment? Your lecture was fascinating, sir.’

Fascinating. No, not from around here, nor anywhere Tom’s been.

‘I am glad you enjoyed it,’ he says.

The boy nods. ‘I’m interested in the lenses.’

‘Go on.’

He has underestimated the boy. Of course he wants to sail the high seas and build towers that will shine out across the waves for years to come, but he has also been learning, somewhere, from someone, about the latest experiments, the new kinds of glass. Tom finds himself leaning against the wall, waving his notes around, forgetting his thirst and the rain on his wool coat. Would you, says the boy, do you think you might possibly, I mean, would you consider maybe coming to dinner, at my house?

ROCKS AT SEA

Ally tips her rocking chair forwards, plants her feet on the pale carpet, leafs back through the pages she has just scanned. She cannot find the chapter she remembers. On the ward they have a fever patient causing concern, and she has a hunch that the fever is incidental to the real problem, that the tremors are not rigor but some disorder of the motor functions. She was sure there was something in Hanson’s Disorders of the Nervous System. Here, perhaps.

There are footsteps coming up the stairs, someone faster and heavier than Fanny, and then a pause. She puts down her book and goes to the door.

‘George?’

‘Cousin Ally. Are you very busy?’ He looks uncomfortable, as if his collar pinches. She can’t remember the last time he came up here to find her. Some concern about his health, or the changes of adolescence? He is, after all, well into the awkward age.

She smiles at him and holds the door open. ‘Not so very busy. Come in?’

He nods, comes to a standstill in the middle of the rug, suddenly bulkier and darker among the embroidered whitenesses of her room, a figure in oils superimposed on a watercolour interior. She pulls forward the bow-legged tapestry stool from her dressing table and sits on it.

‘Have the rocker. Is something troubling you, George?’

The rocker tips him backward. He’s begun to sit like a man, legs thrown wide as if his manhood requires a seat of its own. She remembers how he used to leap into the air from the garden wall, from inside the carriage and from far too far up the stairs, confiding himself to the air like a gull. If she were a painter, she would have tried to paint him so, in that moment of rising, before the fall begins.

Frowning, he rolls the edging of a cushion-cover between his fingers. ‘I went to a lecture. Three lectures.’

She nods, waits. Lectures on prostitution? On spiritualism? There are flyers, she recalls, advertising talks about gold-mining in Australia, and George is just the person, just the age, to be seized by the idea of a long voyage and a treasure-trove under a hot sun.

He looks up. ‘About engineering. Lighthouses. He, the lecturer, he works for the Penvenicks.’

Not, then, a discussion of physiology or the joys of married love. ‘The Penvenicks?’

‘It’s a Cornish firm. They build lighthouses. Richard Penvenick used to work for the Stevensons.’

Her gaze wanders towards her medical book.

‘And Richard Penvenick gave the lecture?’

He looks shocked, as if she’s asked if St Peter gave last Sunday’s sermon. She has not been to church for some weeks.

‘Oh, no. Not himself. No, an assistant. He’s called Tom Cavendish. He worked on the Wolf Rock!’

‘The Wolf Rock?’

He nods, smiling, as if at the mention of some Oriental paradise of silk-clad harems and the whisper of scented trees.

‘It’s a rock off the Scilly Isles. Thousands—well, hundreds—of ships wrecked there. Some of them had come all the way from Australia, all those weeks, just to smash at the very entrance to the Channel.’

Bodies washing on the waves, hair floating out from drowned heads. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Her sister May. She shivers.

‘Oh my word, Cousin Ally, I forgot. I mean, not forgot, of course. I’m so sorry.’

He squirms, five years younger than when he sat down.

‘Never mind, George. You didn’t know her well. Keep telling me about the lecture.’

She wants to say that it’s what my sister would have wanted, for your life to unroll as if she had never been, but she doesn’t know. There was no reason to discuss forgetting. And what May might or might not have wanted is now quite irrelevant.

He swallows. ‘All right. Sorry. Anyway, so they built a lighthouse. The Stevensons. And Tom Cavendish worked on it. They were there every day, just out on the rock. They couldn’t even build a cabin, they had to go out every morning, whatever the weather. They shaped every stone, interlocking all the way up. I’ll show you the designs, Aunt Ally, it’s an amazing thing. Amazing that you can do it. You can’t imagine the waves it withstands. I mean—sorry.’

‘Go on, George. I know that the sea is still there. Am I to take it that you want to be a lighthouse builder?’

He looks up, older again. ‘It’s all I want to do. I can do it. I’ve always liked math. And I’m strong, you know that, I’m never ill.’

‘What does your Papa say?’

He looks down. ‘That’s the thing. He says it’s probably just a fad and last year I wanted to join the Navy and anyway I can do it after Cambridge if I still want to. But I can’t. Cambridge would just waste three years and then I’d be too old for an apprenticeship. And I could study engineering here or in Edinburgh or Aberdeen and actually learn something useful. He says Engineering isn’t a scholarly subject and I would regret Cambridge all my life, but I wouldn’t. He means he would have regretted Cambridge if he hadn’t gone. But honestly, Aunt Al, I’ve never been much interested in art, and I’m no good at Latin and all that. I mean, I can get by, but you know I’ve always liked real things more than books. It’s my life, not his.’

Ally nods. Either of them may be right, as far as she can see, but people learn more from their own mistakes than those of others.

‘You know I can’t interfere between you and your father. What does your Mamma say?’

His face brightens. ‘“Let the dear child be happy,” mostly. Like the ending of a romantic novel.’

They both smile. Aunt Mary’s novel habit has spread into a second bookcase.

He sits forward, coming to the crux. ‘I just thought, you know what it’s like to have—well, a calling. Because you wanted to be a doctor when you were young, didn’t you? And that must have been much harder than me wanting to be an engineer.’

‘Not, though, as hard as if I’d wanted to be an engineer,’ she points out. ‘And you know that there are girls who would give everything for the choice between Cambridge and engineering?’

‘I know. Really, Aunt Ally, I do. Anyway, the thing is, I invited him, Tom Cavendish, to dinner. I mean, I asked Mamma first, if I might. And I thought maybe, please, you might join us? I said Thursday because that’s your day off at the moment, isn’t it? I checked with Fanny.’

Dear George. She remembers herself at fifteen, the strength of her longings and the dread of the god-like powers of the grown-ups. George, plainly, has no idea how much easier these things are for him than for a girl with similar ambitions, but he has, still, his own passion and fear.

‘Very well, George. My “day off” is in no way guaranteed, but if I can I will come to your dinner, and meet this Mr. Cavendish, and if he asks me I’ll tell Uncle James that work one loves is a rare gift not to be lightly discarded. Though I think he knows that, I doubt his own parents particularly wished him to become an art dealer. But I ask you someth...

Table of contents

• SIGNS FOR LOST CHILDREN
• PROLOGUE. HOME
• PART ONE. LONDON, SUMMER 1878
• PART TWO. CORNWALL AND JAPAN
• EPILOGUE. HOME
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR